NAGA CITY---Aimed at easing the periodic flooding in Bicol’s 38 municipalities and three cities, including this city, in the region’s river basin area, the P3.7 billion Bicol River Basin Watershed Management Project (BRBWMP) that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo approved in 2004 has to slowdown because of the slow processing of a World Bank (WB) loan, according to a presidential assistant heading its planning and monitoring office (PMO) here.

        The six-year time-framed BRBWMP taking off only this year, with its total project cost comprising 65 percent as Philippine government counterpart and 35 percent loan funding from WB, expects to  

        rehabilitate and rebuild existing flood control structures and mitigation systems in the Bicol river basin area. The national government targets to complete the project before Ms. Arroyo’s term ends in 2010.

        The project, which also takes off from the outputs of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) funded Bicol River Basin Development Project (BRBDP) implemented from 1973 to 1989, provides intervention to mitigate the effects of natural and periodic flooding of the Bicol river basin. Flooding plagues agriculture production and the lives of some 1.5 million inhabitants within the 312,164 hectare plains along the drainage area of the Bicol peninsula.

        Presidential Assistant for Bicol Tomasito Monzon, chief of the BRBWMP-PMO, during a press conference last Saturday night said the technical delays stemmed from “very stringent conditions” the WB imposes before the final approval of the loan package even though the feasibility studies have already been completed.

        “I am really at a loss as to what the World Bank representatives wanted from our part because the feasibility studies that they themselves had commissioned to foreign consultancy groups remained to be scrutinized and processed by them,” Monzon complained.

        He said one feasibility study by an agency called Nippon-Koi has been done with, covering the areas of the upper basin area in Albay, the middle part of the basin in the third district of Camarines Sur and the lower part straddling the first and second districts of the same province toward a small portion of the province of Camarines Norte. “But [such feasibility study] is yet to be acted upon by the WB until now, he explained.

        Monzon said the stringent conditions included a WB’s proposal for another conduct of a multimillion-peso restudy because the technical team of the government and the WB’s technical team would not agree on certain specific features of the feasibility study.

        He said the technical delays have been exasperating on the part of the government because he said the slow-paced action and stringent conditions compound to derail the momentum of the BRBWMP that could also mean delays in the implementation of major project components.

        An insider at the BRBWMP-PMO revealed in an informal conversation with the Bicol Mail that the negotiating panel of the national government feels that the WB wanted to approve the loan package during Ms. Arroyo’s presidency but would wait for the next president to sit before the loan funds would be released.

        The insider-source further revealed they are now experiencing “headaches” because several politicians are now being drawn to the project, asking requests for list of projects under the BRBWMP.  

        Monzon said several cut-off-channel, revetment, flood control and mitigation structures built some 25 years ago that now require redesigning, rehabilitation or rebuilding could be put on hold, at the expense of the safety and productivity of the people in the area, because the capacity of the existing facilities to control floodwaters has been reduced considerably by the natural wear-and-tear and the typhoons that consistently frequent the Bicol region, year in year out, bringing more Bicol towns underwater at the onset of rainy season.

        He said rehabilitation and improvement of the flood control and mitigation system, built by the ADB-funded BRBD and terminated in 1989, would have doubled rice production in the region and eased the flow of destructive run-offs from the upper river basin area in Albay to the lower basin area in Camarines Sur whenever floodwaters rampage down because the new flood control structures would dissipate the force into several diversion channels to be built under the BRBWMP. 

        Monzon said the flood control structures and diversion channels were to be located in the spots where the meandering Bicol River, the main channel of the Bicol peninsula’s floodwaters, create bottlenecks that clog the smooth flow of the floodwaters during heavy rains.

        “So far, on the national government’s part, releases to the components of the BRBWMP totaled P200M in 2008 through the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) while the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has set aside P104M in 2007. These are not institutional projects of involved lead government agencies that included the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) but are separate components to complete development initiatives under the BRBWMP framework. These are part of the counterpart that the World Bank and the Philippine government agreed upon,” the BRBWMP-PMO chief revealed.

        In a briefing paper provided, the DPWH gets the highest cut of the BRBWMP’s budget with total project cost for the “Flood and Hazard Mitigation” component at the tune of P2.124069 billion, comprising 57 percent of the total project cost.

        The second highest item, “Watershed Management and Development” component, with a total cost of P998.536 million or 27 percent of the total project cost, from 2008 to 2013, would be implemented by the DENR and affected local government units (LGUs).

        The “Institutional Development” component, which the BRBWMP-PMO implements, gets a budget of P382.095 million or 10 percent, spread in six years, while the budget for “Irrigation Modernization” component for NIA to implement totaled  P231.676 million or six percent of the total project cost.

        Monzon said they are now exploring the possibilities of tapping other international funding agencies, should the WB becomes “impossibly stringent” in laying down its conditions, like submitting the project to Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) that he said has shown interest in the BRBWMP.